Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To dismantle, take apart, or demolish; raze.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To demolish, as that which is built; raze; destroy.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To demolish; to raze.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive To
dismantle ordeconstruct (something previously built).
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The Rebuilding Center in Portland, Ore., -- the place we are using to "unbuild" our house -- is the biggest such center in the country.
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We can’t unbuild those Saudi Arabian fields, though happily their supplies are starting to slowly dwindle.
Bill McKibben: Will North America Be the New Middle East? Bill McKibben 2011
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No serious thought, money, or effort goes into imagining how to unbuild the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan or how to voluntarily leave that country.
Tom Engelhardt: Five Absurd Things That Simply Can't Happen in Wartime Washington 2010
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Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.
The Next Slum? 2008
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Perhaps subtle zoning changes and the popularity of such lifestyle centers can sidestep the significant problem that “once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild”:
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No serious thought, money, or effort goes into imagining how to unbuild the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan or how to voluntarily leave that country.
Tom Engelhardt: Five Absurd Things That Simply Can't Happen in Wartime Washington 2010
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Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.
The Next Slum? 2008
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Much like the federal VOI/TIS Justice Department grant program helped build prisons in the 1990s, a transition grant program can help to unbuild them in the 2000s (perhaps best administered by the Commerce Department).
Bill Scher: Good Building, Bad Building: Ending the Prison Economy 2009
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In this inverted Field of Dreams, if you unbuild it, they (the developers) will come.
Scott Page: Welcome to the 2016 Chicago Summer Olympic Games 2008
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The fact of the matter is, and Ehud Olmert stated this best, “Terror built the wall, and terror will unbuild it.”
International Court of Justice: Fence violates Int’l law, must be dismantled | Jewschool 2004
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